Community Workspot

Helping communities work

Friday, December 24, 2004

Community Workspot

Workspot originally centered on personal issues. Where do I keep my stuff, so it is accessible from everywhere? How do I hold a private desktop conference session with another person? How do I use applications even when I'm not on my own machine. Etc.

But working in a vacuum is not what the Internet is about. The web is about connection.

There are plenty of ways to broadcast things to other people. There are plenty of ways to communicate. And, increasingly, there are ways for people to hold asynchronous group conversations.

But there are not many ways for people to work together. There is software, mostly for companies and groups. Workspot should implement more of the features of Open Groupware and like organizations.

But I'm interested in direct democracy, where people can work together to forge their future. This is the next Internet challenge. Large communities actually working together to coordinate positive change.

there are plenty of precedents. eBay uses collective experience to help people make good individual decisions. Amazon's product reviews do this to a lesser extent, Google's Page Rank to a greater extent. The serious internet operations are built on collective knowledge. But why is is just limited to products & information? Why can't we use these mechanisms to, say, run our local community center.